The present disclosure is related to oilfield operations and, more particularly, to positively identifying oilfield assets using a universal identification protocol.
In the exploration for, accessing of, and production of hydrocarbons in the oil and gas industry, numerous pieces of oilfield equipment or “assets” are used. Such assets include, but are not limited to, casing, drill pipe, production pipe, packers, drill bits, pumping equipment, valving equipment, and other related equipment. The cost to obtain and maintain this equipment can be quite high, therefore well operators tend to use and/or reuse many pieces of oilfield equipment for subsequent drilling and development operations. As a result, a single asset may be used in multiple operations.
However, such oilfield equipment and assets undergo considerable stress during drilling and completion operations. For example, assets such as drill pipe or discharge manifold equipment may suffer from material fatigue that may ultimately result in its failure. The failure of such equipment requires the cessation of well operations until the failed asset can be repaired or replaced altogether. As will be appreciated, this can be an expensive and time-consuming process. Accordingly, it is desirable to accurately track oilfield assets and maintain complete service records relating to such assets for the purposes of determining fatigue and other factors relating to their use. Thus, oilfield assets can preemptively be taken out of use before such assets fail.
Oilfield assets are oftentimes tracked using radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to the oilfield asset. Upon detecting a particular RFID with an RFID reader, an operator is able to identify the oilfield asset. Currently, however, there is no industry standard for RFID tagging and no universal RFID protocol. As a result, RFID tagging of oilfield assets can vary, for example, between manufacturers, drilling companies, and/or even from well site to well site, thereby causing communication obstacles and operation delays until an oilfield asset is positively identified.